"The IRS knows very well that such qualities help insulate them from public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy," says David Foster Wallace's in "The Pale King."

Gabrielle Hamilton's simple descriptions of enjoying salty cheese and a warm salted potato in Amsterdam have the same effect as Hemingway's descriptions of Parisian beer and potato salad: They make you hungry.

In a larger sense, all of Wallace's stylings are interruptions -- Brechtian reminders that what you are reading is a construction, that behind it is a man, with his own point of view, who has obsessively constructed the world you are experiencing as whole.

Friends of Wallace have already expressed worry that the author's suicide will affect how readers experience his posthumous The Pale King. I agree that it will. But is that really the reader's fault? And is it necessarily a bad thing?